The Glen Arbor Players’ (GAP) exciting 2024 season starts soon with four plays that span 80 years of playwriting and that tell stories of love, family, history, and mystery.
GAP actors proudly show their versatility and increasing variety of material this season as they expand beyond traditional readers theater format and choose plays that are family friendly as well as theatrically esteemed.
“Bus Stop,” by American playwright William Inge, begins the season. In 1955, it was a Tony-winning Broadway play, and in 1956, a memorable awardwinning movie with Marilyn Monroe. Harriett Mittelberger directs GAP’s production of the romantic comedy-drama about eight bus passengers stranded at a rural Kansas diner by a freak blizzard. Naïve, loudmouthed cowboy Bo, forcefully tries to persuade Hollywood aspiring chanteuse Chèrie to marry him and make his Montana ranch her home.
Mittleberger has always wanted to do “Bus Stop.” She loves other William Inge plays, like “Picnic” and “Come Back, Little Sheba,” whose characters are flawed and lonely but have persevered to look for happiness, sometimes in the funniest ways possible, as is the case in ‘Bus Stop’.”
American playwright A.R. Gurney’s 1981 “The Dining Room” is the season’s second play, directed by Dr. Thomas Webb.
In an upper middle class American dining room, scenes of different families and times overlap and intertwine, the way our own memories do, to tell the story of a declining way of life. Seven impressively versatile actors play up to 10 different roles each, from little kid to old patriarch, in 18 vignettes of family struggle, parental control, fear, strength, love, hurt, and affection. Auditions are Monday and Tuesday, June 17 and 18; performances July 25, 26, and 27.
GAP’s third offering is Noel Coward’s 1930 “Private Lives.” Teddy House directs this comedy of manners about a divorced couple, now remarried to others and on their honeymoons, who find they’re staying in adjacent hotel rooms. Though their previous marriage was perpetually stormy, they realize they still have feelings for each other. House said it is her “first important, classic play” as director.
Auditions are Monday and Tuesday, Aug. 12 and 13; performances Sept. 12, 13, and 14.
Sherlock Holmes and the “Case of the Jersey Lily”, directed by Don Kuehlhorn, ends the 2024 GAP season. In actorturned- playwright Katie Forgette’s delightful 2009 mystery, the wit of Oscar Wilde meets the cunning of Sherlock Holmes when Wilde brings his dear friend and muse, the charming actress Lillie Langtree, to Holmes, the only one who can find the scoundrel blackmailing her over stolen, intimate letters she exchanged with the Prince of Wales. It is a fast ride full of surprises, disguises, and plenty of Holmesian villains.
“Many detectives have come and gone but Sherlock lives on,” says director Don Kuehlhorn. “Ask anyone who the world’s greatest detective is, and you will hear ‘Sherlock Holmes.’” In Don’s view “any Sherlock Holmes play should play as a comedy. Not slapstick but so serious that the humor of the situations and characters comes through.” Auditions are Monday and Tuesday, Sept. 30 and Oct. 1; performances Oct. 31, Nov. 1 and 2.
